


M211 / F81.45

by fiorinda_chancellor



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Johnlock - Freeform, if you squint real hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Mr. Holmes," Stone said, "I've sold my soul to the Devil, and I think you're the only one who can help me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	M211 / F81.45

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for multiple suicide attempts of secondary characters [outside the narrative flow], memories of suicidal ideation, and nongraphic scenes of battlefield violence.
> 
> This story is set between the events of “The Great Game” and “The Reichenbach Fall”. ...Some random notes on clean hardcore, non-canine barking, fireplace pokers and other weird minutiae are at [this page at the Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/65697463486/m211-f81-45-notes-and-links)

FAUSTUS: Come, I think hell’s a fable.  
MEPHISTOPHILIS: Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.  
( _The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,_ C. Marlowe)

***

The second and fourth Wednesdays of the month were surgery days at 221B Baker Street.

John Watson was still tempted to chuckle at the memory of the time he’d been walking down a London street with a visiting American acquaintance—an orthopedic nurse he’d known from the Camp Bastion days back in Afghanistan—and they’d passed the local Labour MP’s office with a laser-printed sign taped up inside the door: SURGERIES TUES & THURS 1-3 PM.

Tim had stopped short, stared at the place (a grimy storefront of utterly unclinical appearance), and at the very thought of any medical procedure being performed in there, moved away again at some speed saying “No, no, no, no, _not_ a chance in hell!” When they finally got to the pub they’d been heading for, it took some minutes for John to explain to Tim that in the UK, surgery wasn’t merely something medical that you did, or a room or suite where you did it. It was also the term for office-hours periods during which both medical and other kinds of professional practitioners made time for walk-in clients to get help with their problems. Doctors held surgeries (as well as doing them, if they were qualified), but politicians held surgeries too. And so did consulting detectives… or rather, _the_ consulting detective, the only one in the world, who’d invented the job.

Quite soon after John moved in with his new flatmate, the second and fourth Wednesdays of any given month were declared surgery days and advertised as such on the Science of Deduction website. On those days anyone might turn up, ring the doorbell at 221B, and be invited up the seventeen steps to tell their tale without a previous appointment. (Not that clients didn’t do that on other days of the week, but those tended to be the urgent ones.) And some surprisingly good cases came of surgeries. The young men who told them the tale that John later blogged as “The Geek Interpreter,” for example, turned up on a second Wednesday.

True, some Wednesdays were less promising than others. The weather on the second Wednesday in October that year was particularly nice for the season—crisp, sunny, bright with clean blue skies and high white clouds, cool and breezy but not yet actively cold. John, who was having several days off from the clinic, would have liked to be out in it rather than cooped up in the flat waiting for the bell to go. Nonetheless he sat there in his chair and did the crossword, and yawned once or twice, waiting for something to happen. He made tea, walking wide around Sherlock, who’d been hunched over the kitchen table since nearly ten that morning, doing something complex and inexplicable with samples of lichen. John sat down again and picked up the Grisham novel he’d been fighting his way through, sighing.

And then the bell went (single ring, pressure maximised near the three-quarter second point, indicative of significantly heightened urgency), and John leaned back and glanced at Sherlock, who was already up and out of the kitchen chair. As usual, John got up and went to join Sherlock by the door. Since that first guy who’d just come barging into the flat and then got so aggressive with the fireplace poker, he’d started making a habit of staying physically close to Sherlock while the detective was in the throes of his first observations of a client. John, for his own part, now spent those first moments checking out what their clients did with their hands when they first came in, as this could sometimes later prove diagnostic (and in particular he liked to check for signs that they were carrying or using firearms).

This client took the stairs with a steady stride, and paused in the open doorway rather than barging in. He was a tall man, nearly as tall as Sherlock but bigger across the shoulders, his hair sort of a sandy auburn and cut conservatively short. He was well dressed in a dark navy suit that was expensive by its cut and material, but wasn’t being very well taken care of: rumpled, even a bit stained in a few places. The man was in his mid-forties, John thought; the long craggy face featured little dark eyes set close above a prominent nose. What stood out for John at the moment, though, was the way the bloke had his hands held halfway up in front of him: a peculiar position. They kept grasping at each other and falling away again.

Sherlock was already in the doorway, looking the man over. “Slow day in the City, Mr.—?”

“Stone. Jack Stone.” The voice was a warm one, low, but very tired-sounding. “Compared to what’s going on with me? Yes.”

“Come in, please,” John said, and pulled out one of the desk chairs for him. Mr. Stone sat down and once again reached for something at chest level, let his hand fall again. _Breast pocket?_ John thought. The cut of the suit jacket was close enough that he immediately discarded any possibility of a shoulder holster.

“My colleague Dr. John Watson,” Sherlock said, gesturing at John. While John sat down in the other desk chair and reached for his notebook and pen, Sherlock settled into the back-and-forth pacing that normally accompanied the first part of any new-client meeting, while Jack Stone got comfortable in the chair. _For certain values of comfortable,_ John thought. He could see the sweat standing on the man’s brow. “But since you’re here, you likely know that. So what brings you to us?”

“Mr. Holmes,” Stone said, “I’ve sold my soul to the Devil, and I want out of the deal.”

John glanced up from his notebook, ready to hear Sherlock slide straight into one of his more scathing modes. But all Sherlock did was pause with his hands clasped behind his back and raise his eyebrows—though the curve of smile that crept onto his face was one John could easily read as mocking. “In that case I’d suggest you’re in the wrong place,” Sherlock said, “as it’s not a consulting detective you require, but a solicitor. If you’re in a rush, normally we recommend the _pro Bono_ centre at the University of Westminster School of Law, just the other side of Broadcasting House. Goodge Street Tube is closest.” And he turned away as if getting ready to go back to his work at the kitchen table.

“Mr. Holmes,” said Stone, “I’ve got a solicitor of my own just over in South Ken, thanks very much. And you must know I’ve been to see her, and if you guessed, which I’m told you don’t, I think you can guess what she said to me. There’s no point in wasting more time pursuing conventional remedies. That’s why I’m here.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have been anywhere near South Kensington today,” Sherlock said, turning back to him. “Though you _have_ been over by Paddington, they’re redoing their Tube station; the dust from the digging there is as eloquent as usual, and it gets everywhere in that neighborhood. In fact I see it everywhere on _you_. Not just on your trouser legs, where it might be expected, but all over your suit. Not very well brushed off, though. Plainly you’ve been in a rush. Take a tumble while you were crossing the street?”

“Threw myself in front of a bus,” Mr. Stone said.

Sherlock’s eyebrows went up at that. “No joy, I take it.”

“Another bus broadsided it in the crossing at Praed Street and knocked it away from me,” said Mr. Stone, sounding rueful. “Nobody hurt this time, thank God. But there’s no point in it, Mr. Holmes. I sold my soul for a change in my luck. As far as that goes everything’s fine, the luck’s changed, all right. But I never realized it was going to happen at the expense of _other_ people’s.” He looked pained. “As soon as I realized what was wrong with the agreement, I decided to kill myself. But as soon as I started trying to die, not only did it not work, but _other_ people started dying instead. That’s just wrong. I was misled as to how this was going to work, so I want out of the contract, and I think you’re the only one who can help me.”

John sat there and did his best to keep his thoughts off his face as he glanced up to meet Sherlock’s eyes. _Not only suicidal, but delusional to boot,_ his first thought had been. Yet there was something too calm and rational about the man’s whole demeanour. Nor was it the flat calm or negative affect of someone heading for a psychotic break. Instead it had a strange, mildly aggrieved quality, like that of someone who’s just turned up at a customer service desk to complain that an item they’ve purchased is in violation of the Trades Descriptions Act.

Sherlock’s glance toward John said, _Insane?_

John met the look and tilted his head a bit to one side, meaning his own expression to say, _Not in any of the usual ways._

His flatmate quirked an eyebrow, looked back toward the rumpled but very calm man sitting at the end of the desk. “Mr. Stone,” Sherlock said, “it seems you’ve read enough of Dr. Watson’s blog for you to think a great deal of my abilities. So I think you know from both his blog and my website that I’ve no interest in taking cases that smack of the supernatural.”

“But according to the Doctor’s blog you’ve taken ones that _seemed_ to,” Mr. Stone said, “and proved them to be nothing of the kind. For you’re a rational man. According to you, the most rational man in London. If not all of England, or the UK for that matter. Wouldn’t you like to do that sort of thing in my case, Mr. Holmes? Get to the bottom of it all and reveal the scientific truth behind the impossible supernatural façade?”

Sherlock’s face went very still, almost cold. John watched and said nothing. His friend’s attitude toward clever clients varied from scorn to delight, depending on his mood, his caseload and (for all John knew) the barometric pressure. And John had long since learned that trying to push Sherlock one way or the other could be dangerous to domestic tranquillity. Additionally, if there was any way to get Sherlock to shove a client out the door, it was any suggestion that the unfortunate was trying to manipulate him.

Now, though, Sherlock broke the stillness and turned to look (as if idly) out the window. And seeing the set of his shoulders, something in the back of John’s mind said, _Hooked!_

“You said that when you try to die and fail, others die,” Sherlock said. “What others?”

Pain fleeted across that face, a terrible lightning-flash of it, and then sealed over again. “My PA, for one,” Stone said, so very calmly. “I was about to throw myself off a building. He tried to stop me.”

Sherlock held very, very still for a moment or so more. John was busy managing another sort of stillness, for that glimpse of pain reminded him of looks he’d seen on the faces of young men just in from the battlefield; men who’d hardly even looked crossly at another human being before and had now just killed their first. _Make it didn’t happen,_ the look said, with a layer of anguish behind it that sooner or later would always break through…

But that anguish had a far side, one that for him was long since passed. John glanced up to meet Sherlock’s eyes again. They were narrowed, and they were alight. _Case accepted,_ John thought.

“Mr. Stone,” Sherlock said, “perhaps you should tell us the whole story from the beginning.”

***

“I didn’t care about luck, Mr. Holmes,” Stone said. “Not when I was young. Not until I went into my line of work.”

“You’re in the City,” Sherlock said. “Derivatives: indeed, _currency_ derivatives. A relatively complex line of the futures banking business that calls for at least a median level of intelligence.”

Mr. Stone’s eyes flashed at that. “I’m a smart man, Mr. Holmes,” he said. “Not in your league, maybe. You’re a genius, everybody says. Fine. But nonetheless I know how to do things, see things, that ninety-nine percent of the population can’t, or won’t, or couldn’t be arsed to. There are some aspects of my own intelligence that I know perfectly well how to leverage. And I’ve proved myself very good at my job over the years. I know when to hold ‘em… when to fold ’em. ”

John knew the song reference, even if Sherlock didn’t. “But still you’re a gambler,” he said. “A skilled one, maybe…”

“I have been,” Stone said. “One of the best, they say.”

“But eventually,” Sherlock said, looking at him lazy-eyed over his steepled fingers, “the law of averages turned against you.”

“My luck ran out,” Mr. Stone said. “It started when I had a currency hedge trade go wrong: yuan against the US dollar. Nothing major. A few million quid’s worth of loss.”

John swallowed, hoping his reaction didn’t show too much, and kept writing.

“I knew I could recoup it in a few days,” Stone said. Once again his hands were working, working together, wanting to reach up and touch whatever was inside his breast pocket but restraining themselves. The feeling of control close to breaking made itself very evident to John. “And for a couple of days, things went quite well. I made it back, made a little more back on top. Not beyond expectations: the market was volatile.“ He shrugged. “But these days, when isn’t it?”

Stone shook his head: his gaze dropped to his hands again. “Then it seemed as if that initial loss had been some kind of warning. Because within a few days, things went really bad. I lost—” He shook his head. “Quite a bit,” he said softly.

John swallowed again, considering what a man who’d described losing a few million pounds as “nothing serious” might consider “quite a bit”: and what the effect on his internal stability might be. He remembered, with embarrassment now, the casual remark he’d tossed off during the Blind Banker case about how suicide-prone the “City boys” could be. Maybe it was a miracle this man was still breathing, even if he _was_ going on about deals with the Devil.

Stone looked up again. “It’s the law of averages, Mr. Holmes, just as you say. Sooner or later, just when you’re tossing a coin a measured number of times, or playing blackjack without counting cards— sooner or later the numbers stop operating in your favour. But this— This was more than that.”

“You began suspecting that someone was orchestrating your losses,” Sherlock said. “Doing this to you on purpose. How?”

“Exactly,” Stone said. _“How?_ No one can influence an entire stock market or region of one that way. It’s impossible. It’d require collusion or cooperation across a huge range of international players! There isn’t any such thing. There _can’t_ be. And why, if you had such an ability to coordinate financial resources worldwide in a given market, _why_ would you waste your time focusing all your attention on one man, to make sure he loses? It’s ridiculous. It’s impossible.”

“Entirely true,” Sherlock said, watching Stone closely.

“Yet it was _happening_ , Mr. Holmes. And it kept happening, over and over again. Impossibly. I couldn’t win a single trade. Are you kidding, I couldn’t win an _argument.”_ He laughed bitterly. “Then all my margin calls came in at once. I paid them all. I had enough funds to do that, but I knew that if I tried to gamble again, I would bankrupt myself.”

 _Knowin’ when to walk away,_ the song sang in the back of John’s mind, _knowin’ when to run._ “Yet you did keep gambling,” John said, “didn’t you? Just one more time.”   

“I made a very reasonable bet on the way the Swiss franc was going to move the next day,” Stone said. “So reasonable. Middle-of-the-road, the safest kind of bet you can make — that it wouldn’t move more than ten percent in either direction. Like betting on both red and black in roulette. _And I lost it,_ because next morning the German and French governments started sniping at each other over some damn thing, balance of trade issues with the US probably, and all the safe-haven buyers panicked and ran away from the Euro and straight for the franc, and the franc moved eleven percent up the next morning, and then twelve percent down that afternoon. I lost the bet _both_ ways. It took the last of my money to pay that call, right down to the few of my bank’s stock options that I hadn’t yet cashed in to pay my other ones that came due, and everything that was available in my credit cards. As if Lady Luck knew _exactly_ what was left in my wallet that day, and took it all.”

Stone’s breathing had gone ragged. “The only money I had left in all the world was what was in my Oyster card. And it was just—just too much, Mr. Holmes, because I tagged in at the Tube station at Bank, and when I tagged out at Pontoon Dock DLR station _that_ card was flat empty too, and I couldn’t think what to do. And I stood there by the how-much-credit-have-you-got-in-your-card machine talking out loud to myself like some kind of bloody nutter, and I said, ‘God damn it to hell, I would sell my fucking _soul_ if this would _just stop happening.’”_

John stopped writing, held still for a moment by the painful way the man’s breath caught in his chest, and how long it took to steady down again.

“So I went home to my flat. What else could I do? Not even so much left to me that I could go out to the pub and have a pint to drown my sorrows. I went in and picked up the paper off the mat, and shut the door, and wondered where a man could possibly go from here.” He laughed, a bitter sound. “The first place, I found out pretty quick. There wasn’t even any change down the back of the sofa. For a man who just a week before wouldn’t have bent over in the street to pick up a fifty-quid note? There’s an all-time low. And I flopped down on the couch and picked up the paper, and started reading it just to have something familiar and normal to do, something that still makes sense. But for all that I didn’t see a word I was reading, I was so rattled, until I found myself going through the personals and I saw—”

“What paper?” Sherlock said suddenly.

“The _Metro._ ”

John made a note, as Sherlock seemed interested. The _Metro_ was the _Evening Standard’s_ tabloid commuter paper, concentrating on London news and ads.

“August 29th,” Stone said. “And there in the personals—”

John’s eyebrows went up briefly. _“Why_ read the personals?” He didn’t seem at first glimpse the kind of man who’d go looking in the papers for dating opportunities.

Stone smiled a bit, the first time he’d done that since he came in. “Dr. Watson, half the business of what I do is knowing when people are greedy and when they’re scared. The public perception of when it’s safe to play the market affects all kinds of trading intimately. And the personals are one way to tell when the balance between greed and fear is shifting. There’s just something about the tone of the messages that changes. Other people have written papers about it, trying to do all kinds of rarified statistical analyses—” Stone shrugged. “I don’t bother with that. There’s just a kind of feeling I get by reading the personals through. When I consider the overall tenor of the personals over a few days, a week, I can _tell_ when people are going to start selling; when they’re going to start buying. So I always read them, it’s a habit. But that night, I came across this one ad.”

He reached into his trouser pocket and came out with a much-folded much-worn piece of newsprint, leaned over and handed it to John. Printed on it were several columns’ worth of personal ads in various widths. And right between a couple of inch-wide one-column ads, the top one for a credit repair company and the bottom one for a chat-or-date number, was one that said,

  
**_UNLUCKY IN LIFE / LOVE / BUSINESS?_ **  
**_CHANGE YOUR LUCK FOR GOOD!_ **  
**_CHANGE YOUR LUCK FOREVER!_**  


And then an 077 phone number: a mobile.

“Interesting wording,” John said. “Could go either way, couldn’t it?”

Sherlock threw a look at John that was both considering and approving.

“Some kind of scam, obviously,” Stone said, as he leaned back in his chair again. “Of course that’s what I thought first. I almost threw the paper out. But the more I looked at it, the more… I don’t know… I kept thinking, _Being rational, doing things by the rules, that hasn’t been helping, why don’t I try something different, something daft? What’s there to lose? Everything’s pretty much lost already.”_

“So you called the number,” Sherlock said. “And?”

“There was a recorded announcement,” he said. “Gave an address to an office in Canada Tower in the Docklands. I was surprised. Seemed kind of high class for a scam site. So I went up there and was interviewed by a little guy in a suit.” He frowned. “Kind of a creepy fella, frankly: not the kind you’d like to spend too much time with. Very smooth in his way, well turned out, Westwood, but… there was something about his eyes I didn’t much like. As if he knew too much about things.”

Sherlock didn’t even have to say a word to John or throw a look his way. The tension in his shoulders made his private thought all too apparent, and John’s fingers began to itch for his gun. “And Mr. Westwood said… what?”

“Cadwallader,” Stone said. “He said his name was Cadwallader. He said that he was here to give me exactly what I wanted, that he could turn everything around for me if I’d just tell him what had been going wrong. So I did, date by date and line by line, because naturally I had trading notes on everything. And there he sits, and pulls out a big shiny Mont Blanc pen, one of those with the diamond in the end, and makes notes on everything I say.” Stone looked embarrassed. “I kept thinking, If this is a scam, why does it all look so, well, _upmarket?_ If someone really did represent the Devil these days, it’s not like he’d operate out of a storefront. He’d want to project success, yeah?”

Sherlock was twitching a bit in his seat. John knew that twitch: there was about to be an eruption of scathing rationality, and it was probably better to head that off for the moment. He cleared his throat, turned a page in his notebook. “So the upshot of this whole process was…?”

“Well, that the Cadwallader bloke says yes, his organization can help me, and then he pulls out a notebook and pages through it to where there’s an address written, and a date and a time—it was three days from then, at ten at night—and he tears that page out and gives it to me. And he says, ‘We’ll have a document for you to sign. By signing it you’ll be agreeing that you understand the contract is not subject to UK or EU law—”

Sherlock had been sitting with his steepled fingers to his lips. He removed them just long enough to say, “Illegal already, then.”

“I don’t think he cared much about that, to tell you the truth,” said Stone. “All he’d say was that after signing, he guaranteed my luck would change, and he saw me out. So I went off home, and then back to work for the next couple of days. And finally it was time to go off to this place.”

He reached into his trouser pocket and handed Sherlock a folded piece of notebook paper. Sherlock opened it, peered at it, handed it to John. “Creekmouth. I mean, who ever heard of a place in London with a name like that? At first I thought Cadwallader was making it up. DLR doesn’t even go there, much less the Tube. They sent a cab for me, anyway. And I really did think it was all a joke, then, when the cab dropped me at this godforsaken address in the middle of an industrial estate.” He shook his head. “Near the Thames, all right: you could smell it. It was just warehouse after warehouse. I stood there for a bit and thought, _all right, this is a scam after all. It’s going to take a while for me to get back to civilisation from here, best get walking, probably I’ll get back home and find someone’s been burgling my flat while I’m out here in the middle of nowhere._ But that’s when the man in black came out to meet me.”

John’s eyebrows ascended toward his hairline. Sherlock looked at him, utterly bemused, and John thought, _Great, one more thing I’ve got to explain to him so he can mock it._ “Tall guy,” Stone went on, completely oblivious to all this, “dressed in black, uh, I don’t know. Army clothes?”

“Fatigues?” John said. _Not a suit and dark sunglasses after all. I should be relieved._

“That’s it. Had a scar right down one side of his face; God knew where he’d been to pick up something like that. South African accent, I thought. Anyhow, ‘Right this way,’ says the Man in Black, and brings me into this warehouse in the middle of a million pallets and containers and big open-topped breezeblock boxes full of sand and gravel and whatnot. The warehouse is full of ever so many more of these breezeblock partitions, some of them just low and some of them going halfway up to the ceiling, a couple hundred of them maybe: it was a big place. And they’re full of all kinds of stuff, these cubbies—timber and bricks and metal scrap and I don’t know what all. Off to one side of the warehouse are a few little office cubicles stacked up, with stairs going to the top two. ‘Up there,’ says Man in Black, so up we go to the top one.

“And in there is, well, nothing in particular: just one of those metal desks and a chair, and a fluorescent light overhead. And on the desk there’re these two pieces of paper, really thick, with their tops all covered with weird writing, and a translation underneath. ‘You have to sign these,’ says the Man in Black. ‘In blood of course.’ ‘And then my luck changes?’ I say. ‘Oh yes,’ says Man in Black, ‘but first you’ll get to see what happens to you when the contract comes due. A little bit of Hell.’ ‘Fine,’ I say, ‘let’s get on with it.’ And Man in Black comes out with a pin and pokes me in the finger with it. See?”

He held out his left index finger for Sherlock and John to see. Sure enough, there was the scar of an old pinprick. John raised his eyebrows, mildly surprised to see so noticeable a scar. “This happened two months ago?”

“Nearly. The guy in Black said it wouldn’t go away. A reminder of the agreement.”

“Indeed,” Sherlock said. “And then…”

“Then he gives me one of those old-fashioned dip pens like they used in schools pre-war, and I sign the agreement, in duplicate, in my blood. It’s harder to do than you think, you know? The pen keeps running out, and the damn blood keeps clotting.” Again that strange mildly-aggrieved tone, like someone complaining about non-tipworthy service in a restaurant. “Anyway, while I’m signing the things, I say, ‘And what happens if your principal doesn’t deliver?’ ‘Oh, he always does,’ says Man in Black. ‘But you just call for an appointment and if you can convince him to revoke, all you need to do is destroy both the documents and it’ll all be over.’ He kind of started laughing after that, though. Didn’t much care for the way he did it.’”

“You’ve got a copy, though,” Sherlock said.

“Yes, of course,” Stone said. “Here it is.”

He reached into his jacket pocket—the hands shivering a little as they were finally allowed to go to the place they’d been wanting to all this while—and pulled out something folded. At first John thought it was a piece of paper, but as the light from the near window caught it he could see that it was thicker and heavier than any normal paper, bigger than an A4 sheet, and shinier on one side. The top half of it appeared at first glance to be covered with some kind of backwards writing, though not in English, and there were some strange blocky or spidery symbols under the block of text, almost like signatures. And below, as Stone said, was the text of the agreement in English, as tidy as if laser-printed.

“So you signed it,” John said. “And then —”

“Then Man in Black told me to wait down in the office on the bottom level, and a driver would come by to get me ‘when I was done’. So I went down there. It was like a taxi dispatcher’s office: a couch, a chair, a desk, very bare. I sat down on the couch to wait… and then—”

Stone fell silent.

“Then,” Sherlock said, “you had a sort of out-of-body experience, did you?”

“Oh no,” Stone said, with alarming vehemence. “No, no, not at _all!_ I don’t think I’ve ever been _in_ my body as much as I was right then.” And he shivered all over. “I… I don’t remember very much of what happened. But I remember the voices telling me what I was, and what I wasn’t, and what I wouldn’t ever be. _Those_ I wish I could forget.” He shivered again. “But when I came out of it I wasn’t in that office any more: I was outside the warehouse building, on the ground, and there was a cab pulling up in the dark. I tell you, I jumped in there in a hurry and went home. Didn’t have to pay for the cab: it’d been taken care of, like the first one. Went to sleep, woke up the next morning with an awful head, sick to my stomach and still hearing those voices a bit. Those cold voices…” He trailed off; then came to himself again. “But when I went to work, that was it: my luck changed.”

“Just like that,” John said.

“Just like that. All my trades went right. I made back everything I’d lost during the bad time, and far, far more. The bank started talking about promoting me to head of derivatives. They may still do it. But…” Stone sighed. “That’s when the trouble started. Anybody who asked me about how I was doing what I was doing, or got at all curious about the change in luck… things happened to them. Broken legs, arms. Trips and falls. One guy, a nice guy in my department, he wouldn’t stop teasing me about the change in my luck, and he had a heart attack.”

Stone went quiet for a few moments. “After a while I realized what was happening, and started to get pretty paranoid, because the accidents happening to the people around me were getting worse. When my secretary got both her legs broken and her pelvis shattered in a hit-and-run leaving a pub in Southwark, it got… well, very bad. I went to see a doctor, couldn’t really explain what was happening. He put me on antidepressants: they didn’t help. Finally I said to myself, ‘Bollocks to this, I want out of the contract: _this_ is stuff I didn’t sign up for.’ Because really, who wants to be lucky only if other people aren’t?”

“So you tried calling that mobile number back,” John said, “to complain, to get the contract annulled or canceled or whatever?”

Stone nodded. “The number was disconnected. And the office is gone, too. Nobody in building management seems to know a thing about it.” He sighed. “Finally I thought, ‘If there’s no other way to stop this, probably the simplest thing to do, the right thing to do… is that I should just die. Because what’s my life when you judge it against all these innocent people getting hurt, more and more badly?’” He sounded more sad than upset: just very, very tired all of a sudden. “I really thought I was going to pull it off, that night at the rooftop bar up at Childers’. But I reckoned without Georgie.”

“The one who died,” Sherlock said.

“He was one of the nicest people in my office,” Stone said. “Likeable: that was Georgie. Such a sound lad, always looking out for other people. He followed me up to Childers’ that night. I think he suspected what I had in mind. He tried to talk me out of it. But when I wouldn’t listen to him, he grabbed me and tried to make me listen. I tried to push him off, tried to make him let it go, I knew where it was going if he didn’t stop— And then. Well.”

There was silence in the room for a little. “So you’re still stuck with your good luck,” John said.

“There’s nothing good about it, is there? I tried again to do away with myself this afternoon, but that got me nowhere. There’s no point in it. Unless I can get out of that contract, I’m going to be lucky all my life, at the expense of the people around me. I’ll wind up having to become a hermit to keep from being a walking collateral damage site. But the Man in Black told me clearly that the contract can’t be canceled unless I can convince Cadwallader to return the other copy to me so they can be destroyed together.”

“And the original is…”

John looked up from the piece of paper on which the address had been written in blue-black ink in a clear and handsome hand. “133 River Road. In Barking.”

Sherlock produced a very small, very dry smile that caused John to roll his eyes.

“Yes, thanks very much,” Stone said, “the irony’s not lost on me, Mr. Holmes. Just tell me that you can help me, that you _will_ help me!”

Sherlock was leaning against the mantelpiece now, fingers still steepled. Now he dropped them, clapped his hands together. “Mr. Stone,” he said, “this is without any possible question the most ineffable _twaddle_ I’ve had the pleasure of being subjected to for weeks on end.”

John sighed and opened his mouth to start mitigating the effect of the rejection.

“And we will take your case with pleasure,” Sherlock said.

John closed his mouth again, in considerable surprise.

“So if you’ll just leave it with us,” Sherlock said, reaching down to shake Stone’s hand, and pulling him to his feet, “we’ll get right to work on it. You’ve been very helpful. We’ll be in touch with you tomorrow and let you know what we’ve discovered.”

John got up too. Stone was looking at Sherlock almost dubiously. “Can you really help me?” he said.

“If we can’t,” Sherlock said, “I can’t think who could.”

For the moment John didn’t see any point in doing anything but agreeing with him.

John got up and shook Stone’s hand as well. “Thanks for coming by,” he said, walking Stone to the door and downstairs, for Sherlock was already on his way back into the kitchen with the items Stone had given them.

By the time John got back upstairs, Sherlock had already swept the table clear of whatever he’d been doing with the lichen and was readying the microscope to look at larger items. John leaned against the doorsill and blew out a breath, shook his head.

“You’re not taking this lad seriously, of course.”

“The case, yes,” Sherlock said, _“that_ I’m taking seriously. But Mr. Stone?” He smiled as he spread the deal-with-the-Devil document out on the table. “What’s your diagnosis, Doctor?”

“Psychiatry’s not my division,” John said. “But I think maybe he should’ve stayed on the antidepressants.”

To his surprise Sherlock shook his head. “He may be confabulatory, or delusional, admittedly," he said, "but his _reason's_ quite sound." 

“Kind of a dangerous balance, I'd say.”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows, and John caught a glint of that look he saw all too often on his flatmate’s face at the sound of any form of the word “danger”. “Perhaps. And the basic delusion has certainly been a commonplace enough one in the past,” he said. “Though admittedly you hear a lot more about supposed possession, these days, than the Faustian Bargain sort of deal. Seems to have gone out of fashion.”

“But you can’t possibly think any such thing is happening.”

“Oh, John. _Please.”_ Sherlock’s sidelong look was edged with scorn. “However, there’s no question that something unusual’s going on here. Only one man we know of would have the kind of reach to pull off such a manipulation.”

“Moriarty,” John said. “But why?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, “we keep coming back to that. Why target _this_ one banker? Is it part of some larger plan to subvert some world currency? Some ploy to move some more distant part of the markets that he’s more interested in?”

“Or some weird way of trying to get to us?”

Sherlock’s gaze met John’s and lingered, assessing though not rejecting. “Paranoia, John?”

“Sherlock, even paranoiacs have real enemies…” A slightly amused pause. “Or arch-enemies.”

Sherlock sat back in his chair again, his eyes lingering on the unfolded piece of parchment. “Too little data for any conclusions, John,” he said. “Let’s deal with the physical evidence first, such as it is.”

 ***

“Ineffable twaddle” was perhaps a kinder phrase to describe Stone’s peroration than Sherlock Holmes would normally have bestowed on something of the sort. But it was a slow Wednesday, as clinic days went, and the details were amusing. Winnowing out the ones that didn’t jibe would be a pleasant enough way to spend the rest of the day, especially as the lichen were taking their bloody time responding to the stress testing.

Sherlock sat peering through the microscope at the material the Deal with the Devil document was written on. It was non-commercial grade parchment, the very best vellum, privately produced from a milk-fed calf less than three months old. Probably not since the _Book of Kells_ had someone taken so much trouble preparing their writing material. _Sourced from a premium specialty bookbinders’, most likely,_ Sherlock thought. _Only two firms in London that work with material of this quality, and usually only to order. A few others in France, Germany, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic. Locally, worth at least six hundred quid per meter-square sheet._

He pushed back and looked at the Petri dish sitting nearby, a big dollop of clear liquid in the middle of it. A fat dark brown splotch was working its way across the clear part as the reagent he’d dripped into it half an hour ago finished its work.

“It checks out,” John said from the next room.

Sherlock had expected that. He folded his hands, leaning on his elbows, and interlaced his fingers, thinking.

“George Middleton,” John said, “age twenty-nine. Fell five storeys from the rooftop beach bar on top of a restaurant next to Covent Garden.”

Sherlock shook his head, rolled his eyes. “A _beach bar,”_ he said. Sometimes he wondered what London was coming to.

“Well, they _were_ getting ready to remove the sand,” John said. “End of season. According to their web page, they bring in snow in November and build a bar out of ice blocks for Christmas.” A pause. “According to the police report, he and Stone were having a disagreement. The witnesses couldn’t agree on what was happening, but several of them did confirm that Stone seemed to be trying to get over or through a barrier at the edge of the bar area. One witness thought that Stone pushed Middleton. Two others said it was the other way around.”

“And of course everyone, both witnesses and suspects, was drinking,” Sherlock said.

“Not the barmen,” John said, wandering in to him with his laptop in hand. “But their view was blocked.”

Sherlock glanced at the Petri dish. _Hurryuphurryuphurryuphurryup,_ he thought, but as usual Time ignored him and crept on at its normal petty pace. “So Stone…”

“Was questioned under caution, but the CPS realized in a hurry that they’d never put a winning case together, so it was dropped,” John said. “Coroner’s inquest on Middleton came back ‘death by misadventure’ due to intoxication. So there you go…”

Sherlock sat quiet, starting to fit pieces together in his mind, or rather in his mind palace. There on the ground floor of the main building embraced by its four steepled towers, just off the chaste chilly polished-marble main hall, was an Assembly Room patterned after the old ones at Bath: a wide smooth empty space, golden-walled, white-floored, where puzzles could be spread out. “What’s the address of that restaurant?”

John read it to him. Sherlock closed his eyes and placed the restaurant, all by itself, five storeys, and listed its data into the air next to it. “All right. And that bus incident?”

“That checks out too. Security cameras everywhere around there, of course, since 7/7: three of them caught it. Just as Stone described it.”

A map of London flowed out from the foundations of the restaurant building, ran straight out to infinity. The bus accident sketched itself out at the intersection of Praed Street and the bus access road on the east side of Paddington Station, one bus more or less straight in its lane, one skewed across the lane on the far side.

“Quite a mess,” John said. “Twelve minor injuries in the two buses. Nothing worse than bumps or scrapes or sprains, though. Not like those other accidents he described…” John sighed. “You want me to start running those to ground?”

“No need right now,” Sherlock said.

He opened his eyes, letting the kitchen reassert itself around him. “But how can you set something like that up, Sherlock?” John said. “Once, an accident, sure. Twice? Coincidence? Maybe. But three times?…”

“Not now, John,” Sherlock said. There would be time to plot in the various other incidents. He grabbed for his phone, pulled up the Port of London Authority website and grabbed a PDF of the day’s tide tables, then scanned down them.

_Yes. Around dusk. Why wait?_

“So what about this, then?” John said, looking over Sherlock’s shoulder at the document signed in blood.

“Well,” Sherlock said. “First of all, the Luminol confirms it: that really is human blood, so lacking evidence to the contrary, for the moment we can assume it’s Stone’s. The document itself—” Sherlock picked it up, tilted it back and forth under the kitchen light to catch its soft glossy sheen and the different ebony glint of the ink. “This is the best possible vellum parchment, longer-lasting than any paper. The writing and designs on it are an excellent restatement of the Urbain Grandier ‘condemnation document’ which was produced at his witchcraft trial in 1634 and identified as his own deal with the Devil, including—see down at the bottom here, above the translation?—what were supposed to be the signs-manual of Satan and several of his major devils.”

John took it from him, peering down at it. “You’re suggesting the person who made this thing _believes_ in this mumbo-jumbo?”

Sherlock leaned back to glance over at the puddle of reagent in the Petri dish, which was finally finishing its work on the ink scrapings he’d taken from the parchment. “Or understands that _others_ believe in it. And might even take such a document to have it validated.”

He picked up the Petri dish, peered into it closely. “Iron-gall ink,” he said, tilting it back and forth in the light. “Not storebought. _And_ not made from just any old oak gall, either, but British-grown ones. Mixed with rock alum, gum arabic, and iron-II sulfate… the classic ‘pact ink,’ in fact. What such documents were supposedly traditionally written with.”

John leaned over his shoulder. “A good permanent ink, then.”

“One of _the_ most permanent,” Sherlock said. “On parchment, it’d be as difficult to remove as a tattoo is from human flesh. I suppose the Devil isn’t thought to care much for having the terms of an agreement altered after the fact.”

John dropped the “deal” document on the table, picked up his laptop again and headed back out to the living room. “So this poor sod gets suckered into going up to a warehouse halfway to the Home Counties and is presented with this very real-looking document, gets a needle stuck in him with some fancy hypnotic hallucinogen—probably another of those new designer ketamine derivatives that’re as likely to kill you dead as blow your mind—is given a bunch of posthypnotic suggestions to ‘change his luck’—”

“It’s a theory, John,” Sherlock said softly as he prepped a slide of the reagent-treated ink for examination. “Not really enough data to start theorizing yet…”

And indeed he was almost unwilling to. Part of what was inclining him to take his time was his irritation over the “luck” strands of the case. _As if there’s any such thing._ As even Stone had been intelligent enough to point out, there were simply times when the laws of probability ceased to operate in one’s favour—the phrase itself being only a recrudescence of the classic Pathetic Fallacy. Only human beings believed that random factors owed them something, or had a “right” or “wrong” way to go. Random factors simply operated _randomly_ , that being their nature. The only way in which the concept of “luck” was of interest to Sherlock was when it instigated crime.

Or manifested it, as in this case.

Sherlock sat quiet for a while, slipping once more into his mind palace to assign the deal document its proper place in the diagram he was starting to build. After a little while he glanced over to where John had his laptop open and was already starting to input a precis of the notes he’d just taken. “So where would you say this falls on the case scale, John?”

“I’d say… seven or better?”

Sherlock nodded. “Better, perhaps.”

“Eight, then. Because…?”

“The attention-seeking dimension, John.”

“Who, Stone?”

Sherlock waved a hand. “Hardly. I mean whoever set him up. Whoever sent him here, so perfectly prepared to get me interested.”

John’s eyes went to him with that look of quick concern that sometimes moved Sherlock deeply and sometimes drove him half mad with annoyance at being unnecessarily fussed over. “The description was pretty straightforward,” John said. “You really think someone _besides_ Moriarty’s at the bottom of this?”

Sherlock took a long breath, let it out. “Granted, it’s tempting to see him under every rock,” he said. “Doubtless exactly what he’d like us to see. Not that he _isn’t_ under half the rocks underlying the criminal infrastructure in this part of the world. And may well be under this one. But paralyzed, John… that’s where he wants us. Ineffective through excessve caution. I won’t give him that.”

“Mental terrorism,” John said. “Give in to it and they’ve won…”

“Exactly. In any case, it _might_ be someone else.”

“But also in any case,” John said, “this whole thing’s a trap. And one we’re now going to walk into, I suspect.” Yet John’s eyes were alive with that glint that meant his adrenaline was rising.

“You know that we need more data about what Moriarty’s been up to,” Sherlock said. “I refuse to be entirely reactive any more as regards his machinations, John. It gets us nowhere. I need more data about how the man operates. And here he is—if it _is_ he—offering this to us.”

“Not like there wouldn’t be something in it for him as well,” John said, wandering back to the settee to settle in with his laptop. “Another chance to get rid of us. We already know you’ve been messing up too many of his little games…”

Sherlock nodded, turned his attention back to the parchment again, and spent some while examining it for any correlation to the handwriting on the Moleskine page with the Creekmouth warehouse address. There was none, which was no surprise, really.

“M211,” John said suddenly.

 _What??_ Sherlock paused, then looked up and rubbed his eyes, groaning in annoyance. “Don’t tell me they’re changing the motorway numbering system _again_.”

John grinned, glancing up from the laptop. “Nope. Turns out there’s this index of the tropes that turn up in fairy tales and legends. M211 is ‘Man sells soul to devil.’” He scrolled down the browser page, peering at it. “211.9 is ‘Man sells soul in return for the granting of wishes.’ 211.11 is selling your soul in return for riches. A bunch of others, with other numbers, where people do deals with the Devil to get him to build them things, or give them some skill. Like fiddling…” He shook his head, amused.

Sherlock sniffed in disdain. “That theme does seem to keep coming up over time,” he said. “Paganini was supposed to have sold his soul for his talent. Tartini’s composition ‘The Devil’s Trill’ was supposed to have been given him by Satan in a dream.” Sherlock rolled his eyes as he turned away. “Typical idiotic, blinkered reaction: attribute genuine personal brilliance to demonic influence.”

“Not something that's ever happened to _you_ , I take it,” John said.

“Certainly not,” Sherlock said, scowling and turning his attention back to the microscope. “The people around me were entirely happy to attribute my mental acuity to fortuitous heredity, my deductive skills to chance, and all my other behaviours to bad example or recreational psychoactives.”

“There are days,” John said mildly, “where I want to punch just about everyone who knew you back in the day.”

“Start with Mycroft, if you would. The rest will keep.”

“Mmm,” John said. His mind seemed elsewhere.

Then he looked up at Sherlock with one of those expressions that suggested some piece of data he’d been trying to classify had without warning clicked into place.

“What?” Sherlock said.

“Wait half a sec.”

John got up and went to the bookshelf that housed his downstairs casual reading and some medical references, and came back a moment later with a copy of a book the presence of which Sherlock had noted only in passing, Zicree’s _Twilight Zone Companion._ It took John a few minutes of paging through it to find the reference he wanted, but sure enough, there it was. “Look here,” he said, and brought the open book over to Sherlock.

“More of your crap telly?”

“Hardly,” John said, apparently deeply offended for some reason. “This is _Rod Serling.”_

“If you say so,” Sherlock said, utterly unimpressed. He scanned down the left-hand page.

 _“Escape Clause,”_ it said in bold letters at the top. There was a black-and-white image of a man behind bars, leaning against them, his face against the bars and the eyes closed.

Sherlock read quickly down the accompanying capsule description of the episode in question. “Mean-spirited, abusive hypochondriac sells his soul to the Devil…”

“’A rotund rogue who calls himself ‘Cadwallader’, saying that he likes the way the name rolls off his tongue,’” John said. “Bedecker the hypochondriac sells his soul for immortality and indestructability, though he’s left an escape clause: he can die early if he wants to. He tries to die a number of times, for thrills. Keeps throwing himself into what should be life-threatening accidents. Then he gets bored and careless. He tries to throw himself off a building…”

“And his wife dies trying to stop him,” Sherlock said as he read down through the article.

John nodded. “He’s arrested for murder, and he likes that, because he wants to try dying in the electric chair. But his defense attorney is too good. Bedecker winds up getting life in prison instead. And since he can’t die, he’ll be in jail forever… So he uses his escape clause, and dies of a heart attack. He gets almost nothing for his bargain, and the Devil gets Bedecker’s soul a lot sooner than expected.”

Sherlock straightened, letting out a breath. “Droll,” he said. “And a bit morbid. Are most of this show’s stories like this? If so it’d be far more enjoyable than that simplistic Doctor What of yours.”

John’s eyes narrowed. “Git,” he said; but his expression was amused. “There are box sets, and it might be on Netflix. We’ll discuss it later. Meanwhile—”

“Someone is evoking specific repeating tropes for our edification,” Sherlock said. “Pop culture for you. The classical end of things for me.”

“As I said. A trap. Tailor made…”

“And we won’t find out why until we look into it.” Sherlock sat quiet for a moment more. “Because if this _is_ he, it’s a change of _modus operandi_. Until that night at the pool, he wasn’t one to get his own hands dirty. If he’s doing something different, I want to know why.”

John nodded. “So when do we leave, then?”

“Not for a few hours yet. It’s way too light.”

“And we’re going where?”

“Where else, John? Barking.”

John chuckled. “Lestrade would say we’ve been going there for months now…”

“John,” Sherlock said reproachfully. “So _dull.”_

“I imagine,” John said, “I’ll make up for it later.”

***

While John was still doing fine-tuning on his understanding of Sherlock’s private case-rating system—which generally seemed to work like the points systems that some countries used to determine whether they were going to give you a work visa or tell you you were wasting their time—an eight or better usually meant big trouble. It also meant that it was smart to bring the Sig. In this particular case, John would have done so anyway, because if there was the slightest chance that he would have an opportunity to drill Jim Moriarty right between his eyes, it was worth the danger of being caught with an illegal firearm. So when they left 221B half an hour before twilight, John was carrying.

It was indeed a long cab ride eastward on the north side of the Thames. Once he knew where they were going, John had pulled the location up in Google Maps to get the general lay of the land. It didn’t look promising. “Creekmouth” proper was where the little river Roding flowed into the Thames from its source away northward in Essex. The aerial imagery showed John a flat and brackish stream running down the middle of a broad, silty channel; one that probably didn’t exactly smell of roses, considering that there was a waste treatment site on its western shore.

He was right about the smell, at any rate. “Insalubrious,” Sherlock murmured as the cab dumped them at the upper end of River Road.

“You mean it’s going to smell even worse in an hour.”

“Mmm. Come on, John.” He led them swiftly down a side road between a vacant warehouse styling itself a “media park” and an old brick-built business that did hardwood floors. About halfway down the road was a gate in a metal fence topped with triple-barbed keep-out spikes. This gave onto a messy parking lot full of stacked pallets and padlocked shipping containers, and a low-ceilinged warehousing facility at the rear, spanning most of the back side of the property. Off to their left this ended where the river side of the property narrowed into a cul-de-sac with a few dumpsters and recycling bins scattered about, and a wall strung with razor wire.

Sherlock trotted toward the back wall. John came close behind him, glancing from side to side and noting the various CCTV cameras and IR lights up on their poles. “Fair number of eyes around here…”

“None back this way,” Sherlock said, and without hesitation boosted himself up onto the wall and stepped carefully along it, flipping the Belstaff’s skirts inward to keep them clear of the wire. Down at the end of the wall John could see what he was heading for: a gap between the wire on this property’s wall and the spiked wall of the next one. “Down here, John—!”

And just like that he vanished, the coat flaring out about him like wings as he fell out of sight. John scrambled up onto the wall, followed him down, and saw Sherlock straightening up below him. It was maybe a ten-foot drop to the green-slicked silt below, and Sherlock was motioning him to hurry.

John jumped and went knee-deep into the muck. It was a soft landing, but the trainers he was wearing were now pretty much history. This he'd expected, and had left his favorite boots at home: John had learned some time ago that any case involving the Thames was likely to be permanently destructive to clothing and footwear.

“Stay close to the wall,” Sherlock said as he reached out a hand to John to help him up. “The security firms doing the monitoring here think they’ve got full coverage along the creek, but it’s less complete than they think.”

“You hacked them earlier,” John said, pulling himself out of the sucking gunk and onto the slightly firmer ground at the very edge of the creek bed, right by the walls.

“While you were getting changed,” Sherlock said, sounding quite self-satisfied. “I can’t believe how stupid people are about their passwords. Whoever’s doing their security in-services needs to be fired.”

John just smiled and shook his head one more time at how casually he’d come to expect that his partner would have no trouble deducing the computer passwords of people he’d never even met. Sherlock caught the smile, flashed one of his own back as they went on.

The two of them made their way quietly along through the dusk against the concrete wall, daubed with fading and waterlined graffiti, in the shadow of a pair of massive towers over to their right. “Must be sixty feet high,” John said softly as they went, looking at the strange flanged rectangular barrier apparently suspended between the two towers. It looked like some kind of giant guillotine. “What _is_ that?”

“The other Thames barrier,” Sherlock murmured as they went, “the one no one knows about. The Barking Creek barrier. Without that, this creek would flood everything right up the Roding and well up past Barking into Essex when the water level in the Thames rises high enough. Of course, once it was _meant_ to. Henry the Eighth did ship refitting over there—” He pointed over toward the sewage treatment plant. “Later there were cargo docks, here, and a fishing port.” He wheeled, his coat flaring around him, to indicate another spot. “And the bargemen and lightermen who ran the water taxis, a lot of them were based here too.”

Sherlock paused, looking around him as if he could somehow see through into those other times. The look was both affectionate and proprietary, an expression John had caught his friend bestowing on other parts of the city often enough; as if London was Sherlock’s, as much as the other way around. “Come on…”

There was no sound from the creek itself—it was too low, just a slow slide of water this time of day—but from upstream John could hear the rustling and soft high-pitched hooting of nearby coots settling down for the night, a couple of ducks laughing raucously. Ahead of them in the dusk, the view toward the Thames  was partly blocked by a long low barge secured near the wall. Away past it, southward, the lights of a high-bowed two-storey pleasure craft were sliding past on the far side of the Thames, trailing a faint noise of voices and laughter. John was briefly startled by a high pulsing whining noise from down that way until he saw a trio of swans come into sight on the left, gray in the dimness, taking off in the upstream direction and doing maybe ten knots into the headwind channeling down the river.

Ahead of them he saw Sherlock’s head lift as he watched the swans go. For no reason he could identify, the hair stood up on the back of John’s neck. “Something disturb them, you think?” he said softly.

“No telling. Doesn’t matter. This way, quickly.”

He waved John over to a metal ladder that reached up the wall just behind the barge, which (as they climbed) John could see was full of construction rubble—big broken chunks of concrete with thumb-thick ribbed-iron reinforcement bars sticking out of them. John made a mental note not to let Sherlock take a dive into that if for some reason they had to make a run for it: all that rusty metal was a recipe for tetanus, if not impalement.

“Keep your head down,” Sherlock whispered down to John as they came close to the top of the wall. “There’s a building just the other side of the wall. Camera’s at the near corner.”

“Couldn’t hack it?”

Sherlock blew out an annoyed breath. _“One_ person who set a decent password. It's always something.” He pushed himself over to one side of the ladder, making room for John to climb up beside him.

John approved: if they went over the top together than one at a time, it meant less time for their arrival to be noticed. He bent his head down by Sherlock’s as he came up even with him. “The camera cycles,” Sherlock said very quietly, John’s ear tickling with his breath. “Wait till it turns.”

John nodded. “What do they do here?”

“Industrial recycling,” Sherlock whispered. “Building materials mostly. Hardboard, old tile, paper, pallets, timber…” His eyes flicked to the barge. “Even old concrete, now. It’s crushed to aggregate, then mixed with sand and gravel and new cement when builders are doing new pours.”

John shook his head. “Strange sort of place to visit to sell your soul…”

Sherlock’s look, seen dimly in the deepening murk, was dry. “Oh, come now, John, what sort of place _wouldn’t_ be strange for that,” he whispered. “Assuming one even has one to sell. —Ready?”

John nodded. They went up the ladder together and over the wall.

The place was much as Stone had described it: numerous breezeblock pens where various bulk recyclables were being stored. They skirted around these rightward toward the big warehouse building, keeping an eye out for more cameras, but could see none.

“This way,” Sherlock said softly, and half bent-over led John along beside the creekside wall to a back door in the sheer wall of the warehouse.

He tugged lightly at it. “Locked,” Sherlock murmured, and pulled out his Non-Amateur Cracksman Kit of custom lockpicks, which if found on him would by itself be enough to get him arrested if the local police weren’t sympathetic. John turned his back to Sherlock and raked his gaze back and forth across the huge yard full of recyclables, not really liking its layout: all those little walls meant there were too many places to hide. _Lots of cover if we have to run for it, though. And lots of cover if it comes to shooting…_

 _Click,_ went the door behind them. John turned to see Sherlock already slipping though it, a shadow into darkness. He braced the door, slipped through after him, pulled the door almost closed and looked around them.

More breezeblock walls, tall and short, in uneven short and long rows, ran down the warehouse floor—a veritable maze of them, dimly lit by nothing more than a couple of feeble wire-caged incandescents hung from the roof. Doubtless during business hours, the translucent plastic skylight-strip running all down the roof’s length was meant to do the main lighting. But John’s attention was on night conditions rather than day, and all the bad thoughts he’d been having outside about being shot from cover now recurred in here.

A touch on his elbow: Sherlock leaning close, pointing across the warehouse floor. “There,” he whispered, and following his gesture John could see what Stone had described, the three office cubbies stacked one on top of the other.

“Top one?”

“Right.”

They ducked away from the lights and into the shadows by the wall, trying to stay out of sight as much as possible, though there seemed to be no one here. _But then Sherlock didn’t think there was anyone at the pool, either,_ John thought, and reached back to his waistband to make sure he knew where the Sig was.

It was fine. What was less fine was Sherlock ranging ahead without him, eager to get up into the topmost office cubbie and certain that John had his back. Which he did, of course, but he wished the git would just wait a few moments so that John could _keep up_ with him—

He caught up as quickly as he could, just as Sherlock had reached the metal steps leading up to the top cubbie and was slipping silently up them. John went up after him, walking sideways for at least half of those steps so he could keep his eye on the theoretically empty warehouse. _It doesn’t_ feel _empty,_ he thought, _that’s the problem—_

From above came the soft click of the office doorknob being tested. Locked. And the softer click of the proper tool from Sherlock’s little leather-roll kit being inserted into it: and a third click as the door’s lock yielded. A soft, soft squeak as Sherlock pushed it open.

Here were the metal desk and the chair, exactly as Stone had described them. Sherlock went through the desk drawers at speed.

“Anything?” John whispered.

“Empty. Come on, we’ll try the one where they made him wait afterwards.”

Down the stairs they went again, John feeling even more like a target this time, enough that he actually looked for dancing red dots on himself and wasn’t relieved not to see them. That itch in his back told him that someone was here, that there were eyes—

Sherlock was down the stairs now, making for the door of the bottommost office cubbie. The shadow of him paused by the door, tested the handle…

 _Click._ The door pushed open. Unlocked…

John liked that even less than the itch in his back, but Sherlock vanished into that room and John went in after, reaching into his waistband. But the room was so tiny as to need no clearing: it was just them. Seconds later Sherlock was searching the desk here as he’d gone through the one upstairs, and he was muttering to himself, finding nothing. John turned to watch the doorway. In the dark, though the adrenaline thrumming through him had its own attractions, he still disliked such small airless places, without even a window. _Still. If anyone comes at us they’re going to have to do it through that door. No other way in._ “Anything?” he whispered.

“Nothing. It was no better than a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose. But worth taking—” And then he stopped. “Wait,” Sherlock said, feeling around in the back of one of the drawers. “Wait just one moment. Something’s not right here—”

“What?”

“False back.” Sherlock came up with another little tool, went to work. _Click._

And then a rustle of parchment. Sherlock pulled it out, folded into a square.

John’s nose itched. He immediately squeezed it between thumb and forefinger: this was no time to sneeze. _Dust, maybe._

“Here we are,” Sherlock said, his voice rich with triumph. “Let’s see now...” He started to unfold it.

“Not right now,” John whispered. “Just put it away and let’s get out of here, all right?”

Sherlock pouted, but for once did as John suggested. “Oh, all right, I suppose it can wait—”

The urge to sneeze got stronger. _Wait. Not dust. Something’s burning my nose._

 _Oh God._ John blinked, his eyes watering.“Sherlock,” he said urgently. _“What’s that smell?”_ Because it hadn’t been there before, and it was acrid, stinging, like something fetid burning nearby, something choking.

And suddenly there was panic rising in John, panic that had nothing to do with the situation here and now, with the possibility of getting caught or getting shot: panic, and a darkness that rose up and clawed at him from inside.

He tried to turn back to Sherlock and saw nothing but a dark-coated shadow falling to its knees, then to hands and knees, struggling to stand again, making a choking noise, collapsing—

John fell too, into another shadow of his own, one that pressed him down into more darkness and swallowed him up.

***

Every now and then in the middle of some particularly bad case, Sherlock had got the notion that this was it for him at last: a case too far, _the_ case too far, the one that was going to kill him. Before this, that had always turned out to be wrong.

Now, though, as the blackness curled into his lungs and expanded into a sort of physical paradigm for terror, it was seeming like that last case might actually have come.

Dark. It was dark, and he didn’t have a torch, and he couldn’t move, and could hardly breathe. He concentrated on that for the moment. In, and out. _In, and out, just breathing, not really that boring at the moment: get that sorted and then there'll be time for the senses._ Maslow’s self-actualisation pyramid: air came first. Then water, then food, then— He couldn’t remember what came after that —

Ridiculous. His memory was near-eidetic. What did he _mean,_ he couldn’t remember? It was in the Palace, stored under— under—

The panic started to build, started to get worse. How could he _not_ remember? This was what the Palace was _for._

He staggered to his feet, sucking in another breath. Better. But he still couldn’t see, he was running blind. _Running. Hah. Walking, for the moment._ But where was he? He couldn’t remember.

_I couldn’t remember much. The cold voices—_

Another voice. Not his own, not any voice that mattered to him, but a stranger. Forget it. Remember something _important._

_What’s the matter with the Palace? Where has it gone? Why can’t I find it?_

He stood there shivering in the dark. It was like waking up in the middle of the night in a strange place and not knowing were you were—something he hadn’t done since he was a child. The Palace was _always_ there, always accessible. Firm, founded on bedrock, unshakeable, lit from within: sometimes more brightly than others, when the one who conducted the light into it most steadily was having an unusual access of brilliance. But now that light was nowhere to be seen, and the Palace itself had gone obscure, lost in this vast unresponsive darkness.

 _I won’t have it,_ he thought. _This is ridiculous._ He drew himself up as straight as he could, fighting off that fear that kept trying to creep up through him, and commanded his Palace to manifest itself.

He stood shivering as that fear drew itself up into his bones regardless, sucked up into him where he stood as if he was a tree sucking up some dark water. And slowly he saw that the Palace was indeed here, but all dull and dim and grimed with the night that clung to it all around.

 _Wrong. This is very wrong_. He went staggering toward the Palace to try to put it right somehow, for he was it and it was he. He went lurching clumsily toward where the mighty brazen front doors would be. Normally they gleamed in sunlight by the daytime of his mind, by torchlight at night. Now they lay ajar in the sheer walls, leaden and cold. His fastness had been breached. His defenses had failed. Someone who wasn't _him_ had been in here.

That was when the name of the fear first struck him. _It’s not the solid thing I always thought. The Palace is flawed._

And then it began to occur to him, as he squeezed himself through the narrow gap between the massive bronze doors, that perhaps it had _always_ been flawed. That all the time he thought he'd been crafting a mighty edifice of Mind made tangible, he had actually been building something that was doomed to fall. And that the reason for the doom was his own fallibility, his pride. That he wasn’t really as clever as he thought he was. That the whole place was built on an illusion of certainty… when certainty didn’t really exist.

In the great empty white-marble front hall, which had always gleamed bright, now everything was stained with uncertainty and error, like soot. And there where there should have been nothing but the sweet silence that protected him against the outer rush and racket of incessant data, there was instead a long soft groaning sound: ominous, threatening.

Unsound. That was it. The buttresses of the place were bowing under stresses he had never anticipated. Cracks were forming in the foundations. He had never fully anticipated the stresses that would be put on it in some situations, but now, _now_ it was all coming undone…

The fear burned like ice in his bones as he felt the shiver of the floor under his feet, saw the first great crack go stitching across it like an earthquake fault. And out of that crack came crawling strange shapes, creatures with multiple arms and legs, and they came stalking toward him, slow, feeling their way: for the moment they were having as much trouble seeing as he.

They were memories. And looking on their shapes, he suddenly realized that they were impossible, for they were memories he had deleted.

He backed away, a step at a time, slowly. But it would be useless: he knew it would. Many of them were memories of unpleasant things: some of them were actively dangerous. All of them had been locked down in the dungeons, during his pleasure. But now the certainty that _ensured_ that durance was fraying… and the images were starting to come back, starting to crawl toward him again. Old “deleted” sneers, others' youthful cruelties, unbearable rejections… they were coming for him once more. He wanted to sob, for it was terrible to have to face such things alone. _And that’s wrong too. I wasn’t alone, I_ wasn’t—

The cold in his bones was growing into a paralyzing thing, though for the moment he could still move, and he kept backing up from the dark clawed shapes that, when they saw him properly, would leap at his throat. _Grief is a paralytic. Yes._ But fear… what was _that?_ His heart beat faster and faster at the realization that his own mastery of his mind was in fact a delusion, and that _it_ was master, not he: that its splendors and fierce powers were not in his control, never _really_. Simple chemical things, like cigarettes or drugs, were the _real_ masters, not he. Though he fancied them his slaves, he was _theirs_ , and his use of them was the expression of that slavery…

 _It’s not entirely true,_ said some faint voice inside him. But nonetheless it was seeming more and more to him, moment by cold moment, that the great structure of data and memory that reared up through level after level of his interior world was in fact built on sand and could crumble at any minute. Had begun to, in fact. Was crumbling _now._ And as punishment for his pride, he must now watch it fall, and himself come down with it.

 _And what will be left? What will I be after intellect is gone, after the data’s scattered, after synthesis and analysis are together strangled in the cradle?_ He could find no answer to the question. Because strange echoes from long-hated playing fields and by-others-hallowed halls of learning were surging in on him again, escaped from the dungeons, terrible remnants of the commonplace/dull/boring/useless classical education that had been forced upon him in hopes of making him just another of _them_ , one more of the dull grey hordes in love with Mammon and brute Power, those who did the jobs others forced on them instead of inventing their own. _I had forgot that foul conspiracy / of the Beast… and his confederates / against my life: the minute of their plot is almost come —_

He fell to his knees, crushed there by the weight of the old horror he’d been blocking for so long. Above him he could hear the groaning of beams and and shattering of stones, the weight-shouldering buttresses bending terribly under the stresses he’d thoughtlessly placed on them, never thinking he’d come to a place where the physics of the mind would itself come into question and the whole structure come under threat. _I think. I think_ therefore. _I think therefore_ I—

—but certainty, _certainty_ was gone, he couldn’t be _sure_ any more. _Two plus two is—_ But _was_ it? _A squared plus b squared equals c squared—or_ does _it?_

It was all going, _all_ of it. _—these our actors as I foretold you, were all spirits and / are melted into air, into thin air—_

—and there was nothing solid, nothing that could be depended upon; science withering, mathematics failing, reason itself coming undone—

He crouched down on himself, unable to bear it, the final destruction of the most important things he believed in. Physical reality itself was now unreliable. Forensics itself was become a nonsense. Evidence was no such thing. Above him, the Palace shivered, wavered, started to go insubstantial around the edges. _Into thin air—_

_—and like the baseless fabric of this vision, / the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous Palaces, / the solemn temples, the great globe itself, / yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve —_

All over now. All done. Mind and matter together, finished. One’s supremacy over the other, gone forever. _And like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind—_

The roar above him grew greater. The upper stories were crumbling. They would take the whole structure down with them. They would crush him under them when they fell, and Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced in pain and grief and covered his face, unable to bear the sight of the imminent destruction. For Science had been beautiful, _the_ most beautiful thing: and physical reality with its unforgiving hard edges had been a great joy, the one thing to be relied on when people failed you and sentiment betrayed you into the hands of those who meant you harm.

He clenched his hands in his hair and tried to cope with the pain and terror of it. _This is not the way to go,_ Sherlock thought in shame and rage, grinding his teeth together for the sound of it, for the sensation, ugly though it was. It was proof that inside his own head, at least, physics still worked, science was still in residence. _Though for how long,_ he thought, hearing the rumbling building up around him.

 _But I am not going without a fight! Because there are things worth fighting for, worth falling in the fight._ And though memory was crumbling, buried deep within it there, he knew, were some of those things. He stretched out his hands into the horrible uncertain void around him to find something to hold onto, something to use for leverage so he could stand up and defy this destruction even though it wanted to take him with it. _Let science and all reality go, but I’m still here and_ I’ll remember them—

But through all this the howling void was laughing at him, because something vital was missing. There was no point in laying out a proof, asserting a position, if there was no one to hear. _If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear the sound,_ went the ridiculous conundrum, _has there been a sound at all?_ And alone in this rumbling darkness, now at last he started to feel the truth of the saying and the terrible loneliness that came with it. No one to hear whatever one’s voice spoke, no one to say _yea_ or _nay_ to the proposition, no one to rebut or refute.

_Or accept—or even tell you it was amazing—_

Yes. Somewhere here was the memory of someone. But they weren’t here now. Here, he had no one to depend on but himself. Here at the end of all things, as it had been from the beginning, he was alone. But alone or in company, still a stand had to be taken. He would stand up under the weight of loneliness and betrayal and bear it, though all physical reality’s shattered structure should fall down on top of him: because that’s what he would have done if the other was by his side.

There had been company, steady and sure. He remembered how it had helped him bear up when the darkness came for him in its lesser forms. But all that weight was on his shoulders alone now. Groaning under its weight, as the structure itself was groaning, he pushed up: Atlas bowed under the great globe, straining upward under the weight—always destined to be crushed but rebellious against the certainty still. Because there _were_ some things worth fighting for, some weights _worth_ being crushed under! _There_ ought _to be Science,_ he thought, gasping. _There_ ought _to be rules!_

He got his feet under him, and staggered, and knew he was about to fall. But for that one moment it didn’t matter. Just the one ray of light broke through, sudden, unexpected. _And there ought to be—_

And he knew its name.  _His_ name. _John! There ought to be_ John!

He stood, he pushed himself upright, for just that moment, though he might never do it again. _John!_

And then the weight came crushing down on him. Sherlock staggered, and started to fall the fall from which he would never rise again. But still he reached out toward that light. If he had to die, let him die thinking of _that:_ of _him._

And then out of the darkness, unseen and all unexpected, the warm strong hands came from nowhere and gripped his, _hard._

***

Beige. It was amazing, really, how Hell could be beige.

The sand: that was what he fell into first, in his dreams (when they got out of hand). It was such a cliche, as there _wasn’t_ any sand where he was shot. Where the Taliban had attacked the perimeter at Bastion and broken through, and Army personnel who were never meant to be under arms on base had suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives, it was (as it had always been) fairly normal plains country, grassland with stunted trees.

_—when you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,_  
_And the women come out to cut up what remains,_  
_Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains_  
_An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier —_

Bloody Kipling, he got into everything, didn't he? But it didn’t matter, really. There was no rolling _anywhere_ when he got shot. The shock, that had been even worse than the pain: the sheer stunning impossibility of it. _How did this happen to me?_ There he lay with the sun scorching his eyes blind and his body refusing to answer him.

And then when they’d picked him up and brought him in and started the first of the surgeries that were going to save his life and put his shoulder back into commission, already the fear had begun. Even while he was mostly blissed out on premeds before the very first surgery, the fear had been whispering in his ear. _You know what just happened to you. You know it as well as they do. What if they can’t fix it?_

_Then you’re done._

And so he had been. For suddenly the exquisite sensitivity and deftness of his dominant hand, the perfect delicate skillful control that had set him apart and marked him out as a surgeon from the very start: it was gone. Done. Over. And what the loss of neural control and range of motion didn’t kill, the tremor and the limp did. One heavy-calibre bullet had left him more suited to doing surgery on trees with a handsaw. Assuming the tremor would let him hold one without dropping it.

That old cold of terror was in his bones again now, the memory of how it had been as he tried to convince himself that the loss of function was temporary. But it wasn’t. It was permanent, they told him. And again and again he woke up from nightmares, not of being shot, but of what came after, voiced in the calm and ruthless words of one of his instructors: _there is nothing more useless than a sick doctor._

 _Useless._ The one thing he’d sworn never to be: that was what he’d been then, all at once and irrevocably.

That was when he first started to think that he might as well be dead.

He’d gone through the stages of grieving for his lost practice as if it had been a person who’d died. He refused to stay stuck in Anger for very long, despite a personal tendency toward fierceness: the two didn’t really sort well with one another. But Grief he wallowed in for a long while; and as for Bargaining, how long did he stay there trying to get the universe to sign a contract it didn’t know existed? Acceptance, when it arrived, was bitter beyond belief. And it was very beige: the colour of that desolate bedsit, the colour of too many bleak city dawns (because like many depressed people he had trouble getting to sleep or staying there). Against that beige, the cool dark blued steel of the Sig had seemed like the only bright and interesting thing.

 _Uselessness:_ the inability to help anybody, the inability to _matter_ to anyone. They were all aspects of the same thing. And now he stood there once more on one leg that ached, with a hand that trembled, there all alone in the dark, and knew himself useless again. The worst thing, the thing he’d rather be dead than.

Except there _had_ been somebody. Somebody to be useful for, useful with. Hadn’t there?

Was that real, or just something he dreamed?

But no. The flash of darkness across his vision, cutting through the beige: that had been real. That had shocked him a little, in retrospect. How could darkness have seemed so bright? Contrast was everything, apparently. Dark suit and dark coat and dark hair and eyes that though light had that gunmetal glint about them… and the air of challenge that came with them, the sense that someone interesting, someone fascinating, someone a bit infuriating might find him _useful—_

That was real. That was _too_ real, too _different_. He could never have imagined that by himself.

Except everything now was a fog of shadowless beige, and he couldn’t see the darkness anywhere.

 _Well, damn it, I’m not going to just_ stand _here._ And he went staggering into the beige to find the darkness.

That was when the beigeness started to fight him. A wind whipped the fog up and made a sandstorm of it, one that started to sandblast the flesh right off his body. His shoulder screamed pangs of warning pain at him and the limp came back in force and the hand shook, and it was all about terror, all about not being any use to anyone, of being rejected when he tried… until finally he would get tired of trying, and just end it. _And really,_ the sand sang in his ears, _what was the point of trying? The outcome was inevitable. Sooner or later one person too many would say “No thank you” in that pitying tone of voice, and he would go back to the bedsit and get the Sig, and that would be it, and if he was angry enough, he might take other people with him. Better do it now and avoid the collateral damage…_

But wait. Wait.

The limp came _back._

Which meant it had been _gone._

 _No no no,_ screamed the sandstorm in his ears, _you were delusional, it was never gone, you don’t just lose a psychosomatic limp overnight._

“Shut _up,”_ he said to the sandstorm, though terror curled in his gut and rose like vomit and nearly choked him. Terror of being wrong, of being delusional, of being crazy as _well_ as being crippled and useless.

But screw that, because there had been a limp, and then it _had_ been gone. And ahead of him, as if in a vision, he saw shadow against darkness, the more charcoal-coloured shadow flaring outward like wings as it jumped from one rooftop to the next.

 _And like an idiot I jumped right after. Right after_ him _. How would I ever make something like_ that _up?_

He could still feel the way his heart had been pounding then. And it was pounding like that again now. That excitement, that peculiar joy, that sense of being with a kindred spirit both for the first time, and somehow again…

His heart leapt in him. _If this is crazy, I’ll keep it, it beats sane._ Where is he?

There was a name. It was trembling in his brain the way a word does when you’re trying to remember it and it goes by a little too fast and you have to hold still and try not to scare it when it comes around again.

The terror rose up in him, itself terrified, and tried to keep him from remembering it.

 _Fuck that,_ he thought, and quieted himself again, though he could feel the fear writhing all through him like black snakes, curling around his limbs and trying to hold him still and distract him from the memory, from the warm fascinating annoying irreplaceable darkness, the one to whom he was the most use and the very best—

He heard a distant groan, a deep voice, a dark one, calling his name. And memory seized on that voice and knew who it belonged to.

_Sherlock!_

He staggered forward into the beigeness as it shrieked and fought with him: fell down in the sand, the damn sand again: stood up, and followed the voice, though he kept banging into things. _Because_ you're _stuck in something like this, I bet, exactly the way I am, and I am_ not _going without you._ And though the beige sandstorm screamed louder every moment and tried to push him the wrong way and blasted his eyes raw until the tears fell, he kept going. And at last he bumped into one last obstacle, half falling over it, and the dark voice cried out in anguish right in front of him, _“John!”_

And he reached out and grabbed, and found long strong hands reaching for his, and they gripped his and pulled and he pulled back and the beige fell away and it was all darkness and a rumbling sound—

***

And then there was light, and it nearly blinded him even though it was so dim.

He was out in the middle of the warehouse space, half in and half out of one of the breezeblock partitions, and he had hold of Sherlock’s hands, and Sherlock himself was trying to scramble up and out from under what looked like a sheet of plywood or wallboard, and on top of it was what looked like a layer about a foot and a half thick of great lumps of crushed concrete or clean hardcore or some such heavy deadly stuff, and right behind him was about a mountain’s worth of it beginning to slowly slide down onto him—

“My God, Sherlock, _help me out here,_ get up get up get _up!”_ John yelled at him, and he set himself and leaned back and pulled. All ungainly (and so strange that looked on him), Sherlock staggered to his feet and more or less fell into John, and they both backed away from the landslide of aggregate-or-whatever-it-was that was in progress.

“John,” was all Sherlock could say for some moments.

“Never mind, come on, get _away_ from this!” They staggered away together in a kind of non-tied-up three-legged race, as Sherlock’s legs weren’t working terribly well just then.

“Fresh air,” Sherlock gasped. “Air, any air but what’s in here…”

“Fuck yes,” John said, and they made for the door that John had left a little bit open.

They came out into the open warehouse yard and lurched over to one of the lower breezeblock walls and leaned there, gasping. “Are you all right?” John said. “Are you hurt anywhere? Let me help you —”

Sherlock stood gasping and just shook his head. “John— I think you saved my life in there, just now— That’ll do you for the day, don’t you think?”

John grinned. “Then let’s bloody well get out of here—” He happily coughed the last of the beige out of his lungs. "Before our little friend sends the Man in Black along to finish what he started.”

Together, helping each other, they made for the river wall.

***

The first thing they did when they got home that evening, after bathing or showering and otherwise getting cleaned up, was text Mr. Jack Stone and tell him to come immediately to 221B, where (as John put it) they were about to conduct the spiritual version of a mortgage burning. When he arrived, they showed him the original that was mate to his copy, had him cut them in quarters himself (as parchment is quite difficult to tear), and put them in the fire, where they burned with the stink typical to vellum when it’s fairly new.

“Your luck,” Sherlock said, “if any such thing exists, is now _your_ problem, no one else’s. So thank you, and good night.” And though Stone started gabbling about fees, even John wasn’t willing to have that conversation right then. _“Tomorrow,”_ he and Sherlock said, more or less in unison, and pushed him out the door.

A while later, when both had had a bit to eat and each was ensconced in his own chair by the fire, the inevitable analysis began. “There’s a quite virulently toxic hallucinogenic poison I've seen mentioned in the toxicology journals,” Sherlock said after a while, “called _radix pedis diaboli:_ Devil’s foot root. Burned, and dispersed as fumes or an aerosol, it’s said to cause dreadful hallucinations of heartstopping terror. The perfect murder weapon: one's own greatest fear…”

“Might have been something a little wrong with the delivery system,” John said softly. “Or maybe we got out of there just in time.”

“Meaning,” Sherlock said, “if I’d taken much longer to get the original of the contract out of its hiding place and then paused to peruse it on site, as I wanted to, we might both have taken a dose we couldn’t recover from, and be dead right now.”

John sighed and restrained himself from saying anything that could have been construed as “I told you so.” “There are a lot of maybes about this case,” he said. “It’ll take a good while to sort them all out. The coincidences, for one thing. The accidents. The failed suicide attempts. Moriarty can do a lot of things… but not _all_ the things that happened in this one. Suggestibility, self-fulfilling prophecies…”

Sherlock nodded. But he still looked a little troubled.

“What?”

“The whole premise underlying Stone’s predicament,” Sherlock said. “The question of luck. The loss of it, or regaining of it. It just doesn’t make sense. And I’m really not sure it exists, not the way he means it. It offends against Science.”

John stretched in his chair. “You mean the kind of luck that puts a bullet through a man’s shoulder in time for him to be invalided out into a city where the world’s only consulting detective needs a flatmate? The kind that puts that same man right where he needs to be to put a bullet through the cabbie who’s about to do away with the consulting detective?”

John shook his head. “Who knows? In another seventy-two hours, my gun might have gone off one of the times it was in my mouth. In another seventy-two hours, the wrong pill might have been in yours. Yet it didn’t work out that way.”

“Random factors, John,” Sherlock said, very low; almost as if he'd have liked to say that he believed in that kind of luck, though the admission would have embarrassed him later.

“Or just plain Mystery,” John said at last. “Why can’t there be a place for that in the Work? How can every case be _completely_ solved?” He saw the look on Sherlock’s face, and smiled anyway. “What’s wrong with the universe being not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we _can_ imagine?”

“Disorderly,” Sherlock muttered. “Repellent.”

John shook his head. “Mysterious,” he said. “We can’t know _everything_. And that’s just fine.”

Sherlock scowled, and stretched, and said nothing. But after a while he got up and went into the kitchen to rinse out his whiskey glass, and possibly also to have a look at his lichens.

By the time he came back, John had reached for his laptop, waked it out of hibernation, and started typing up some notes. Sherlock paused by John’s chair, looking down at the page he was typing. At the top of it was the heading _M211._

“What? Oh. Dreadful name for a case, John,” he said, leaning with both hands on the back of the chair as he looked over John’s shoulder: eyes drooping in gentle scorn, or something else.

“Yep,” John said, his tongue sticking a little out of his mouth as he typed with two fingers. “I know. Not final. Probably use something a lot more tabloid, yeah? What the readers like…” He paused, glanced up.

Sherlock just looked down at him for a moment. Then his right hand slipped down from the back of the chair to grip John’s shoulder for a long moment while their gazes met. “John.”

“Sherlock.” He swallowed.

“You’ve had quite a day. Don’t be too late.”

“Right,” John said.

Sherlock nodded, and a smile gradually revealed itself, slow and slight and curved, like the new moon coming out at twilight. Then he turned and headed through the kitchen, back to his room.

John held quite still for several moments, looking into the fire… then turned his attention back to his typing. He brought up the browser window he’d been hiding under the Word window and went back to his careful reading of it. There was quite a long list of phrases on it, all prefixed with letters and numbers, so many of them strangely applicable to things that had happened to him and Sherlock since they'd met; as if the two of them had effortlessly fallen into some business much larger and older than their own. _Bargains and promises. Arrogance repaid. Dark traitors. Accidental encounters leading to adventures. Foolish disregard of personal danger._ John snorted softly, smiled a dry smile at himself. They’d plainly seen him coming a long time ago, as some of the stories associated with _that_ motif went back thousands of years. ...And then there was _The ways of luck and fate._ At _that_ one John gazed for some while in silence, while the fire flickered low in the hearth.

He went back to his search down the list, and at one point he paused, his eyebrows going up. _K871: Fatal deception by hallucinogenic._ But he shook his head and kept reading, because he knew what he was after. He’d seen it before.

A second later John brought the Word window back to the forefront and gazed again at the title he’d been considering. His face went still for a few moments. _Not right for the blog,_ John thought. _I’ll be changing it later, as he said._ But for the moment he merely added a slash after the letter and numbers already there, and added the letter and numbers _F81.45._ A second later, because he believed in being methodical about his citations, even when they’d never appear in the final blog posting, down at the bottom of the page he he added the page’s URL and the line number, and the motif to which they referred:

_Journey to hell to retrieve soul of dearest friend / beloved._

And then he smiled and shut the laptop’s lid, and went to bed.


End file.
